OMG not win98

[spkenny]

Ok, I have a customer who has a compaq laptop, 133mhz 6 gig hdd with 128mb ram. This guy wants me to put win98 on this laptop, and I need some help on how to do it. I can't get it to boot from the 98 disc and am trying to figure out how to get it to do so. I havent worked too much with 98, and need some info on how to get it from the disc to the hdd. Making a floppy boot disc in this case seems pointless since it has interchangeable drives, that you have to take the cd rom out to put the floppy in, and back and forth as needed. Even more above all this, I'm wondering if this thing will take 98 at all. I believe it had 95 installed previously, but dont know because the gentleman had wiped the drive trying to install 98. Please help before I pull my hair out, or worse shoot this laptop!!

 

[Matthew DeCarlo]

This isn't much help with the issue, just a potential work around. Have you asked if there is a specific reason for wanting Windows 98 on the machine? If you can get your hands on a copy of Windows 2000 it's probably better off.

If you sell it to him that he'd be significantly better off with 2000, maybe he'll take that route and you'll be able to avoid everything .

 

[spkenny]

would windows 2000 even run on this thing?

 

[Matthew DeCarlo]

Yep, it should. It's within the requirements according to Wikipedia:

133 MHz or higher Pentium-compatible CPU
32 megabytes (MB) of RAM minimum (64MB recommended)
700 megabytes hard disk space (2GB recommended)[40]

System requirements for Windows 98:

486DX-2/66 MHz or higher processor (Pentium processor recommended)
16MB of RAM (24MB recommended)
At least 500 MB of space available on HDD.

Might not be the most viable route, but, it's a route never-the-less. I myself don't have a ton of experience with Windows 98 either, considering the fact that the first PC I owned had XP haha.

 

[SNGX1275]

What do you mean you swap the floppy and CD drive? They don't use the same connection on the motherboard.

You can boot off a 98 floppy (bootdisk.com if you don't have one) then navagate to the cd drive in dos and run setup.exe. Should be something like D:\Setup.exe

2000 will run on it, the boot process will be PAINFULLY slow, but it will run, and it won't crash like 98 will.

Seriously though, why is he wanting that computer? It is too old to do anything 'modern', even web browsing is going to be a poor expierence on it. Unless you are playing early to mid 90s DOS games that computer is fairly worthless now. I suppose it could be made into a linux firewall or router box, but that clearly isn't on the table if he wants 98 on it.